Archive

Legal Eagles is a fun comedy-drama-thriller written by Jim Cash and Jack Epps, and directed by Ivan Reitman. It stars Robert Redford as New York assistant district attorney Tom Logan, who teams up with his rival, public defender Laura Kelly (Debra Winger), after he becomes convinced that her client, eccentric art dealer Chelsea Dearden (Daryl Hannah), is genuinely innocent of the crime she is accused of committing. As Tom and Kelly delve deeper into the case they find themselves becoming embroiled in a web of mystery, cover-ups, and police corruption, dating back to the night 20 years previously when Chelsea’s father was killed in a mysterious fire; not only that, and despite their own better judgment, the two lawyers find themselves developing romantic feelings for each other. The film is a breezy, enjoyable caper, with Redford and Winger’s relationship clearly inspired by the sexual tension between Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, and was one of the box office successes of 1986. Read more…

World of Warcraft has been one of the most popular MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) in the world since it was first launched in 2004 by Blizzard Entertainment. The game has grown over the course of the past decade and a half, through five or six different expansions, and had 5.5 million active players in October 2015. Rumors of a big-screen adaptation of the game surfaced as early as 2006, but delays in production resulted in it not being released until almost a decade later. Directed by Duncan Jones – son of the late David Bowie – the film stars Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Ben Foster, Dominic Cooper, and Toby Kebbell, and is a vast canvas of humans and orcs battling for supremacy in a fantasy-inspired world of knights and monsters and magic. Unfortunately, the film has not been a success, critically or commercially, with many reviewers focusing on its wooden screenplay, overly-complicated plotting, and clichéd comparisons to the Lord of the Rings series, instead of its really quite astonishing visual splendor. Read more…

Orson Welles recognized Herrmann’s talents and so when RKO Pictures signed him to a contract in 1941 he brought Herrmann along as his composer. Their first collaboration was “Citizen Kane” (1941), which earned Herrmann acclaim and his first Academy Award nomination for Best Score of a Dramatic Picture. The film is a masterpiece, set in the period of American industrialization. The brilliant screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz uses this backdrop to portray a great man’s rise and fall due to a misuse of power, which leaves him emotionally and physically isolated. Herrmann understood immediately the impetus of the film’s tragic narrative saying “it’s a picture about wealth and power… Kane, in my opinion was totally misunderstood.” Wells gave Herrmann unprecedented access and 12 weeks in which to write the score, which he used to create what I believe to be his Magnum Opus. Read more…

Independence Day: Resurgence is the sequel to the 1996 sci-fi disaster movie classic Independence Day, and sees director Roland Emmerich returning to the genre that made his name, him having spent much of the last decade trying to prove himself as a serious filmmaker in other arenas, with varying degrees of success. Twenty years have passed since the events of the first movie, and in the intervening period the world has used the technology of those defeated aggressive aliens to boost Earth’s military prowess. Scientist David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) is the man in charge of the EDS Earth Defense System, which has its headquarters on the Moon. Dylan Hiller (Jessie Usher), the son of Will Smith’s character from the first film, is a hotshot pilot in the EDS, along with his best friend and colleague Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth). The then-President of the United States, Thomas Whitmore (Bill Pullman), remains a close advisor of the current President Elizabeth Lanford (Sela Ward). When the alien forces return to Earth, this time with bigger and more powerful weaponry, and attempt to conquer the planet for a second time, all are called into action to face this new, even more terrifying threat to humanity. Read more…

Producer Robert Evans of Paramount Studio was determined to bring F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary classic, The Great Gatsby (1925) to the big screen. He hired trusted screenplay writer Robert Towne for $175,000 to write the script. Towne however had a different ambition and managed to convince Evans to take on his own 1930’s detective mystery thriller titled “Water and Power” for $25,000. Well, Evans liked the script saw opportunity, and so moved forward with production. He greatly enjoyed his collaboration with Roman Polanski with Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and so brought him in to direct. They assembled a fine cast, which included Jack Nicholson as detective J.J. “Jake” Gittes, Faye Dunaway as Evelyn Cross Mulwray, John Huston as Noah Cross, John Hillerman as Russ Yelburton, Perry Lopez as Lieutenant Lou Escobar, and Darrell Zwerling as Hollis Mulwray. Read more…

I’ve been rather hard on Steve Jablonsky over the years. Back in 2004, after he wrote his magnificent score for the Japanese animated film Steamboy, I confidently predicted that he would go on to become “the next John Powell,” and follow in the illustrious footsteps of his one-time Media Ventures colleague to become one of Hollywood’s best composers. It’s true that, financially, many of Jablonsky’s films have done very well. His quartet of Transformers films were gargantuan box office successes, and his quartet of classic horror movie reboots – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street – all grossed more than $50 million each. Unfortunately, the music that has accompanied these films has, for me, been mostly disappointing, especially considering the wonderful heights that Steamboy attained. Parts of scores like The Island, Dragon Wars, and Your Highness remain guilty pleasures, and with the benefit of hindsight the original Transformers score has actually held up remarkably well over time, but most of the rest have been predictable and by-the-numbers, contributing greatly to the endless parade of boring Hollywood summer blockbuster scores that all sound the same and have no soul. As such, going into the score for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, I had mentally prepared myself for another entry in a long catalogue of mind-numbing dumbed-down action scores. However, I’m very happy to report that my expectations were significantly surpassed, to the point where I can confidently say that, for me, this score is Jablonsky’s best work in almost a decade. Read more…

Having enjoyed what will, in all probability, go down in history as the most successful creative period of any composer in film music history from 1975 through 1984, when he wrote the scores for Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, three Star Wars films, Superman, two Indiana Jones films, and E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial, among others, John Williams quite rightly decided to take a break. With the exception of a couple of episodes of the TV series Amazing Stories, he didn’t write anything in 1985, while in 1986 his only score was this one: the children’s adventure film SpaceCamp. Directed by TV veteran Harry Winer, the film followed the escapades of five brilliant teenagers (including Lea Thompson, Tate Donovan, Kelly Preston, and Joaquin Phoenix) who enroll in NASA’s SpaceCamp program with a view to becoming astronauts when they grow up. After meeting their instructors (Kate Capshaw and Tom Skerritt), and a friendly robot named Jinx, the kids are allowed into the cockpit of the Space Shuttle Atlantis during a routine engine test; however, a malfunction occurs, launching the shuttle into space, and forcing the inexperienced children to work together to try to bring the shuttle safely back to Earth. Read more…